


The Investment

by delimited (eggfish)



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Lyctor Trials, Anachronistic Warfare, Colonial Mindsets, Gen, M. Bias Approved Necromancer-Cavalier Relationships, Shitty Teens In Abundance, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26200429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggfish/pseuds/delimited
Summary: The sun blares foreign pinkish light as it crests the horizon. Isaac's heart leaps. He's been waiting for this since he was twelve. Jeannemary has been waiting her whole life; she finds his hand with hers, and he squeezes back tight.(For the Fourth House, war is the only way to prove yourself. For the Eighth House, it's the holy duty you exist to perform. But on their first deployment, the heirs of both Houses will be forced to see it in a very different light.)
Relationships: Jeannemary Chatur & Isaac Tettares
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is a ridiculous premise for a fic but I have my reasons okay. Disclaimer (HtN spoilers): I'm taking the Harrow Cohort chapter as more suggestion than canon worldbuilding. After all, that thing sprang from the mind of a big nerd who explicitly does not care about the military.
> 
> Shoutout to Allie (aka margaret-rhee on Discord) for being lovely and a seriously good beta.
> 
> **Content warnings for the whole fic: lots and lots of war and violence and death, colonialist attitudes, canon typical necromantic fuckery**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra warnings for this chapter: some medical horror(?) in the first part

Isaac stares harder at each grainy low-orbit photo of the Nariman fields that will serve as their battlefield tomorrow, going through worst-case scenarios in his mind. Situations where he'd call for retreat, or stage a last-ditch attack, or use one theorem over another in case of thalergy shortage. On the day he'll have no real authority beyond guiding his platoon to carry out Command's orders to the best of their ability, but he can't abide the thought of not preparing _somehow._

Behind him, his cavalier's hands are gentle on his back as she retraces the burning lacerations of the necromantic theorem in medical cream. "Relax, 'Zac," she says, pausing to scrub her knuckles against the back of his head where the hair's shaved short, and he shivers. 

"I'm trying," he assures her. "Just get it over with." 

"Fine. Y'know, they're even more gross today," Jeannemary decides. "No more blood but there's freaking, Bechamel sauce?" 

"Freaking, eat me then?" he parrots back, and she yowls in disgust. "But yeah, that sounds right. They hurt more, too." 

She sucks in a breath. "Mine do as well." Her tension borders on excitement. She's always handled pain better than him. 

He does her back next. The ward wounds they got for deployment, bleeding cell-death thanergy and kept open with bacterial infections from the Cohort labs, are standard for the front lines. Heavy entropy to disintegrate projectiles; preservation and topological regeneration in case of major impacts; senescence for when the enemy gets within range. Less of that last one for Isaac, and more of it for Jeannemary, whose primary objective is to defend him while he powers their wards and those of thirty unattached soldiers. 

When it's all over, the scars will be cool as _fuck._

\-- 

The final muster is a tense affair. Most companies are sent wholesale from the military of their House, but the 32nd Company is a true Cohort mix - this way he can claim real battle experience instead of being sheltered by a horde of Fourths vying for the Baron's favour. He needs that if he wants to be a credible head of House when the time comes. 

Everyone is in their armour, a riot of House colours and styles ranging from brand new to family heirlooms. Jeannemary cuts a boyish figure in tight blue leathers that flatter her warm brown skin; next to her, well, at least Isaac's purpose-dyed ginger hair pops against his navy robes. (Necromancers rarely look good in anything.) Five hundred sets of mail, plate, leather, kev, silk and polyester gleam under the white ship lights. Five hundred backs fidget under the sting of their wards. 

The whole company stands to attention as their captain paces in front of them. Cinch is her name, and she's tight and neat as any professional soldier, which is unusual for a Fifth. First she plays the recording from Major Biologue. It's just a cursory reminder that they will bring glory to the Empire by their efforts, since Narima is a planet filled with infidels. 

Then she says, "Soldiers, you know why you are here. You know what you are doing. You know who you do it for. 

"For some of you this will be your first deployment," she continues, looking directly at Isaac. He feels a thrill of nerves and embarrassment, but manages not to respond (though Jeannemary bristles behind him). There was always going to be antipathy for anyone high-ranking or rich enough to skip straight to lieutenant. "Those especially, and all of you, remember that your lives are no longer your own. If you do not fight as one with not only your counterparts, but all of your fellow soldiers, there will be House blood on your hands. Dismissed." 

As the 32nd file out into the corridor, the 31st begin to file in, a solemn river of Eighth white and silver neatly passing by their multicoloured mass. There are a few nods between the two groups, but mostly the 31st has stayed apart from the rest of their battalion. Everyone joked about how unlucky they were to get deployed with the House whose soldiers literally take chastity vows instead of, say, pretty Thirds or perpetually horny Sixths. 

Isaac suspects it was some higher-up Second machination to foster inter-House relations. The Master Templar is currently in the 31st Company, on his coming-of-age tour, so this is one of the very few chances they'll ever get to befriend him - the Eighth are getting almost as reclusive as the Ninth these days. Sadly, the guy is about as amicable as a frozen fish, even when Isaac uses every bit of Fourth sincerity and Fifth charm that he knows. He's only two years older, but Isaac suspects he dismisses them as children. 

Even now, it's not hard to find Silas Octakiseron's pale and face in the passing crowd - not with his cav sticking out like a sore thumb. But when Isaac tries to catch his eye, the other boy doesn't even seem to notice. 

\-- 

At dawn their ship touches down on Nariman soil with a great clout of maroon dust. Its doors open and the ramp shoots out, and the 32nd Company march down it and form up in long ordered rows on the fallow winter fields. Soldiers in front, necros at the back. Further out, blocked by too many others for Isaac to see, the 34th are doing the same on their right. The 31st and 33rd won't disembark until the initial thanergy bloom is underway. Isaac surveys the distance between them and the red-walled city of Cutler: it seems so close, like they could easily pass through the battleground, make their way up the broad roads, and be staying in its hotels before sunset. But landing the ships took time, and the enemy army are already amassed in front of them, all in dull greens. 

The sun blares foreign pinkish light as it crests the horizon. Isaac's heart leaps. He's been waiting for this since he was twelve. Jeannemary has been waiting her whole life; she finds his hand with hers, and he squeezes back tight. Glancing around, he sees that most of his fellow soldiers look excited too, or calmly focused. A few are more subdued - close by, the unfortunately named radioman of Isaac's platoon, Signaller Bicycle, looks washed-out and small under the weight of his transceiver backpack. Bicycle reminds Isaac of one of his little brothers, and he badly wants to ruffle his hair and tell him to go back inside and do some homework instead. Instead he just claps the boy on the shoulder and tells him, "Good luck," for which he gets a tight little nod. 

Then the sign comes, and the cry goes up: "The Fourth!" Isaac roars with all his little fourteen-year-old lungs will give him, and others are roaring their own Houses with him - 

The Cohort pelts across no-man's-land into the ranks of the enemy, and everything goes mad. One of Isaac's platoon - a guy named Florian - goes down in the first sixty seconds with a spear in his chest, body flickering in a lightless paroxysm of thanergetic release, and Isaac is so shocked it takes him a moment to remember to grip the man's fading life with his mind and _squeeze_ until it bulges and pops into an explosion that sends him flying in a hundred flaming pieces and his killer flying in fifteen more. His first kill, technically. Up and down the line screams and clangs and gunfire erupt, punctuated by the hot bursting sounds of spirit bombs and the bass-heavy cracking of enemy explosives. 

Isaac forges forward over the field, pouring thanergy into his wards and setting off explosion after explosion wherever he locates an opening. Jeannemary is a whirl of steel, clearing the ground ahead of him and shepherding the troops with her high-pitched yells, but he barely notices. 

Instead he's busy craning his neck to see further out, caught in the necromancer's compulsion to analyse a complex system and bend it to his will. He expected the Cohort to overpower the Nariman forces with their superior training, their necromantic arts, and their devotion to a righteous cause. He expected to see hasty formations breaking against their geometric and merciless advance. Instead their jewel and earth tones are mixed indiscriminately with the enemy's sickly greens in one big fighting mass. _This is just what it's like up close,_ he tells himself. _Look for the bigger picture._ It's something Abigail says to him. 

The bigger picture is this: the Cohort are fighting an army that knows necromancy shockingly well. They keep their distance as much as possible. They work toward the necro in each group and disengage quickly when they die, leaving the unshielded soldiers to be picked off by barbaric gunfire. They defile dead bodies with flamethrowers to dissipate their thanergy, so the battlefield is choked with the reek of burning flesh, and they wear huge plex goggles to keep out the smoke, making them look crude and buglike. The Cohort are gaining ground against them, but it's a slow and bloody thing and based on the difference in numbers more than anything else. 

Isaac cauterises the little part of him that wavers at this sight and keeps moving. He's the scion of the Fourth and necro to a Chatur and pupil of Lady Pent herself, he has to contribute more than this - he stretches his hands outward and his necromancy along with them, shielding as many Cohort men and women as he can reach. Then - after a moment's indecision, he turns his attention to their opponents. Unconsciously, he begins to rub his thumbs against the tips of his fingers, heating them up. Burning bodies? He'll show them burning bodies. If he thinks into the right state of mind, each of them is just a little lightbulb, a shell housing a filament of spirit, and if he just rewires each of them so the circuit passes through their flesh… 

Blood runs burning down the back of his throat, and oily blood-sweat trickles into his eyes and makes them burn and mist up red, but when he hears the enemy begin to scream he slams his hands against his thighs and his own primal yell of victory forces its way out too. In his periphery he can hear JM yelling back, _Isaac?_ but he doesn't reply, staring as the members of his platoon cut down their smoking assailants. Almost all of them are still alive, and they're pulling the line forward in a great upwards V. 

Isaac thinks, good. Isaac thinks that Jeannemary is going to be very proud of him. 

"Isaac!" Jeannemary screams again, and suddenly he feels an impact on his right and the world blurs and he's rolling in bloody soil, scrambling to turn and see his cav right next to him, grappling with a bigger man in red-spattered green whose slick wounds make him reckless enough that he drops his guard altogether and takes a wild swing with his sword at her neck - she twists and the blade slices into the meat of her shoulder, and she shrieks. Then she cuts his throat with her sword and pushes him neatly off. 

"Jeanne," he says, horrified. They both scramble to their feet, leaning shaking against one another for support before she shoves off and settles into battle stance again, head twitching back and forth like a bird's as she scans for more enemies. There are none - he's cleared out this area for good now. "Jeanne, my bad. Sorry. I was spacing out." 

"C'mon, 'Zac, I thought _you_ were supposed to be the one keeping _me_ safe. What happened to the chicken I met all those years ago?" 

"God, I don't know, I was so concentrated on everything else that I just -" 

She shakes her head, a few escaped curls of hair bouncing at her temples. "I was kidding, dumbass, it's my job as cavalier to defend you. You're doing amazing." Her face is still all scrunched up from pain, but when she grins at him it lights up her whole face and gives him a rush of happiness so strong it's like a live current going through him: she _is_ proud of him! Fuck yes, he thinks, he'd cook a thousand more people in their skins for her! This is the real reason he's here! He smiles back idiotically, and then remembers that this is a war and also she got hurt literally because of his idiocy. 

And now he isn't keeping up with the other soldiers he's responsible for - even as he thinks this he feels the flare of a life going out, and another on its heels, and even as he checks their locations and detonates them he can't help but feel the ugly acid burn of shame - he surely could've helped them. Getting distracted by your cavalier's wounds is a schoolboy error. 

As soon as he takes his eyes off Jeanne she starts gravitating back to the battle. "Hey! Wait till we can get that fixed," he tells her, grabbing her arm with one hand to stop her and signalling over Medic Epta with the other. 

Jeannemary frowns. "It's just a cut. You patch me up, we're getting behind." 

"Oh yeah, I'll just patch upthe future greatest swordswoman of our generation with my baby-ass first-aid magic. You're high on adrenaline, JM." 

Jeanne grumbles that he has a baby ass all right, and consents to show her shoulder to the medic. Cosmo Epta is a Seventh necro who they slightly hate, due to her being irritating and also having more battle experience at the same age as them, but at least she can knit muscle tissue back together in a way the human body approves of. 

"Milady, that is just beautiful," Epta says, flexing her fingers over the wound. "Taking a blade for your necromancer... I'd get a tattoo of it afterwards if I were you. With flower accents, or a calligraphic quote." 

"Oh, shut up, Epta," Jeannemary mutters. ("Yeah, Epta," Isaac mutters, distracted trying to thread six corpses together as an independent ward battery.) 

"I would, but your injuries just keep talking!" she says, as if that makes any sense. "Done. You've been such a brave patient, Jeannemary, _very_ good girl." The _very_ good girl's nostrils flare threateningly, but luckily at that moment there's a burst of staticky speech from Epta's radio and she jumps up and hurtles off to her next victim. 

After that things get messy. Isaac is a spirit magician through and through, and he can't stand messy. Spirit magicians do things cleanly and elegantly; they work in places where flesh and bone is just an encumbrance to be shaken off. Before long he's tripped over too many bodies wrecked beyond identification to call this either. Moving ahead of the rest of the line left his platoon exposed - he should've told them to fall back, he should have - and now they're badly outnumbered. He wants desperately to pause and figure out how to give them more of an edge, but it's all he can do just to stay alive himself. He's forced to fend off half his attackers with ugly flashes of spirit flame and radio Jeannemary the directions of the rest, and as much as he trusts her skill he hates ordering her into danger every time. 

It feels like far too long before his radio, clipped onto his ear in a way that's been setting Fourth jewelry trends for decades, cuts into life with a new tone of static that resolves into Signaller Bicycle's tenor. "Command to infantry. Thanergy sufficient, fall back. Over." That's all. Isaac confirms and relays the command on to his soldiers. 

Jeannemary almost won't come back; he has to go and find her in person. She's bleeding from at least five wounds, and her fierce expression has set into a sort of panic. 

"That can't be it," she's saying vaguely. "I'm not done. That _can't_ be it." 

If Isaac weren't so numb, he thinks he would feel exactly the same. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and guides her away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (crying) it's so embarrassing having to write from the POV of a cringy teenager


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HtN spoilers!

As the 32nd Company extricate themselves from battle and head back toward the ship, they begin to hear a weird and uncomfortable noise drifting out of the thinning smoke: the sound of hundreds of voices, raised in a chant both guttural and devoid of emotion. 

"Oh, God," Jeannemary mutters.

"Yeah," Isaac agrees hoarsely.

The ground thuds rhythmically under the tread of Eighth House boots as homogenous and steely phalanxes of swordsmen march past, droning their prayer. Some pull with them the great catapults and cartfuls of oss that form the real basis of any Cohort attack, while a very few escort bone-drawn chariots carrying necro-cav pairs in blinding white. Isaac, and Jeannemary, and many others, can't help but turn back to watch the spectacle unfold. The Eighth are the Cohort's most prized troops, more efficient and devoted to the cause than any other; getting to see them fight is a privilege available only to others risking their lives in these most critical of battles.

The prayer ends in abrupt silence, and wind whistles across the silent battlefield. The machinery of the Eighth slides into motion. 

The enemy are given no chance to retreat. On some unseen signal, loaded catapults snap forward, launching projectile masses of pale bone into their ranks at regular intervals; unattached necromancers raise headless bone constructs that attack the enemies with strange, economical motions, stirring up panic. The Eighth's tight-packed infantry hits the resulting mess like a knife scraping leftovers off a plate, the impact of their shield wall so powerful that some of their opponents are physically thrown back. Then, as if the Narimans weren't being pummeled hard enough already, the necromancers in white begin to soul-siphon. 

Isaac knows the theory, and the theory seems awful enough, but witnessing it in person he begins to understand that on a much more visceral level it just sucks. It's awful. It might be the worst thing he's ever seen. He clutches Jeannemary and turns his face away and still, without seeing it, he can feel it: the necromancers taking the cavaliers' souls out, and the River welling up inside their empty bodies like giant wounds. 

Abigail's voice, a lifetime ago. _...spirit magic is the magic of the megalomaniac,_ she'd said, leaning back from the desk beside him. _Manipulating a person's flesh and bone can be done easily as shaking their hand. But how can you manipulate a person's spirit without necromancy? The only way is to kill them. Spirit magic seeks to control the lives and deaths of others very directly._

"Isaac, look," Jeannemary whispers. "It's our favourite dickhead templar."

 _That's a false equivalence,_ Isaac had protested. _You can't judge the ethics of necromancy by how a non-adept would have to do it._

 _Perhaps you're right,_ she'd said, glasses flashing in the lamplight. _But I often suspect we're a bit too focused on beautiful means, and have neglected to address the identical consequences._

Isaac looks up in time to see Octakiseron's distantly glowing figure make a cutting motion with one hand, like an impatient speaker demanding silence. With that gesture he creates - out of absolutely _nothing_ \- the biggest anti-thalergy field Isaac has ever seen. The other necromancers in white are doing the same, creating an unbroken barrier hundreds of metres long just behind enemy lines. There's no trickery or tactical cunning to it - just a gaping rectangular void of thanergy where not even the smallest bacterium can hope to live. 

The onslaught of the Eighth's sword-and-shield forces the Narimans straight into that void, like the final move of a ladder checkmate. Neat and simple.

\--

"We're onto the hard part now," Captain Cinch says as they're walking back, coming up behind Isaac and Jeannemary and making them both jump a mile and scramble to salute. "At ease, Lieutenants. You did far better than I expected today. Good work."

"Thank you, ma'am," they reply leadenly, a little out of time. Jeanne doesn't even seem to register the back-handed nature of the compliment.

"A word of advice. Chatur, I could hear you from the other side of the field. You make yourself into a target, for better or worse. Tettares, you need to focus on your own men and trust other necromancers to do the same. Twenty soldiers in formation are better than thirty spread out."

"Yes ma'am," Isaac says, though he isn't necessarily sure that applies to his performance.

"If you keep this up, you might even be an asset for however long we manage to keep you," she goes on. "Are you just doing the one campaign or do you plan to stay on?"

"Until I turn eighteen and have to begin my duties as head of House, ma'am," Isaac says.

Her eyebrows raise. "Optimistic." She nods at the city behind them. "Focus on surviving the next few days first, I'd say. The real battle begins tomorrow."

"Even after - " Isaac can't think of a way to say it aloud - "all of what we just saw?"

Cinch looks grim. She has a hard, heavily freckled face, and grim comes easy to her. "I've seen a few spider companies fight," she says. "They're good on the open plain, when the enemies' movement is easy to predict; we did real damage today. But Cutler is still refusing our terms of surrender. And when it comes to sieges, Eighths are too rigid and short-term to be useful. You really want tries who can squeeze corpses for more juice, or even sixers to detect surprise attacks early. I hear bone witches used to be the best of all. Three general companies and an Eighth… We're going to have trouble."

Out of nowhere, Jeannemary blurts, "Isaac - " She's looking at him with a kind of doubtful shame on her face, like she's about to admit she didn't rank first in duelling for her age group this month. "And Captain Cinch," she says, rounding on them both now. "I need to tell you - two of the soldiers I killed were yelling something about _Eden_."

Isaac can feel his heart pounding in his ears, at that, but Cinch just nods. "You're not the only one," she says. "They've certainly done their homework. Maybe this is one of their planets."

"In that case, shouldn't we… I don't know. Be trying to capture them alive?"

"Sort of the point of a siege, Chatur," the captain says. "Until Command says otherwise, our job hasn't changed a bit."

\--

Shovel-armed skeletons grind their way through the farmland by the great iron gates, digging a trench around the camp where the Cohort have established their ordered streets of tents. Outside, soldiers laboriously collect the dead into two piles: one to be blessed by white priests and used for tending to the wounded, the other to be hoisted up on stakes as thanergy sources for coming battles. Soon the sky will be dark enough to see the distant pinprick of Command in orbit, poised to snipe any Cutler shuttle out of the sky the moment it flies high enough.

Isaac has been helping put up wards around the camp. As he hurries his way back through the bruise-purple darkness, he hears the distant thump of someone playing Fourth warpunk on a set of speakers, and a lively mix of voices from the same direction, chatter rising over the noise. Many have the high cadences of teens and tweens - youngest age you can join up is ten, on the Second and Fourth, and only the Fifth keeps you till as old as eighteen - and Isaac tries not to think about his siblings. Isabel will be ten this year and it would be hypocritical to try and convince her not to follow him.

Some of the teens have begun singing along to the chorus, and there's a different chant that sounds like drink-or-dare. Back on Tisis Jeannemary would be off to that sort of party like a homing missile, with Isaac in tow. Instead when he ducks into their tent she's sitting up waiting for him, red-eyed, with the white lamp hanging from the center pole throwing her features into shadowy relief. Her undone hair frizzes chaotically around her head. 

"Isaac, we have to _do_ something," she says.

The Blood of Eden are the ones who killed her mother and his father. The most cunning intergalactic terrorist organisation that the Empire has ever faced down, with a bloody, primitive ideology that can insinuate itself seemingly anywhere. Within Isaac's lifetime they've become increasingly violent and desperate, culminating in a monstrous nuclear strike on Cohort warships just a few months ago. For that alone they deserve to be rooted out, but the fact remains that _they killed her mother and his father._

When the report came that Sir Chatur was dead, last year, he knew that he couldn't listen to Abigail's anti-war rhetoric anymore. _She_ hasn't lost family to the savages in those shadowy outer systems; it's an intellectually contentious point for her, no more real than the battles in the histories she pores over. The last Sir Chatur was his favourite adult ever - unpredictable and irresponsible for a cavalier primary, maybe, but always on their side, and always with another story to tell about the adventures of herself and his long-dead father. She was both his and JM's biggest inspiration, and her loss was unforgivable.

So he joined up, at long last, to strike back against the worlds that had spawned the Blood of Eden. Now, having them trapped like rats in the city - knowing they're dying on the swords of the Cohort around him - it's like God himself heard his prayers. But Jeannemary is right.

"We haven't fulfilled _jus ad bellum,_ " he says, settling onto his sleeping bag opposite her.

"Is that dead language?"

"It's a phrase first used by one of the Emperor's Lyctors, referring to the requirements for declaring a just war," he explains. "We have the authority of God himself, and our cause is his Empire. But the theory says we should also be confident that we can win with the use of proportionate force." This is stuff he's brought up with Abigail before; she taught most of it back to him in more detail, because she's batty about Lyctoral history, then cut the argument to ribbons before he realised he needed to defend himself. Regardless, it's what the Cohort works off.

"And you think now we're up against BOE we can't win?"

"We can, but not in time. We're up against BOE-trained soldiers, and like the captain said, we're the wrong battalion for the job. Winning will take loads of casualties on both sides, and we'll probably have to starve them into surrender, so the civilians will suffer for like months. That's not ethical warfare. The ringleaders could tunnel out, if they have time to go deeper than our wards." 

Jeannemary nods, leaning in. "So we assemble an elite team of our best warriors, climb over the wall in the dead of night, and sneak into the city to take out their leaders."

"Oh my God, no," Isaac says, alarmed. "Regardless of anything else, they use so much of the old technologies, we'd be caught in seconds."

"True, they'll have living cameras and dark vision or whatever," she agrees. 

"I think... we can just write to Judith and Marta, one House to another - plus the Fifth's backing - and ask them to make sure we get extra quick reinforcements. With them we can intimidate Cutler into the fast surrender we were planning on. This whole thing was 'cause of Command's lack of intel; I know the Cohort is spread thin, but they should be able to spare another few hundred men to protect two sets of heirs. In fact, we can ask Octakiseron to write too."

With every word, his cavalier has deflated a little more. "Isaac, that is so fucking boring," she groans at last, scrubbing her hands over her face. 

He chuckles. "That's what I'm here for."

She flops down on her own sleeping bag, which is parallel to his rather than at the foot of it because this is the 101st century for goodness' sake. Isaac takes the cue to switch out the light so they can get in bed.

"I thought I might die today," she says in the darkness. "I mean, obviously... but even before that, all my training… knowing it could be over in one battle, 'cause that's what it is to be a soldier. I never let myself think about making it to day two."

"Metal as hell," Isaac says sincerely. He's always admired (and fretted over) her stoic attitude on this point. _Fidelity,_ is what it is. He thinks his cavalier might be the most Fourth girl in the world.

"Feels weird, 's all," she mumbles. "Like I shouldn't be here at all."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In real life Augustine of Hippo was one of the first proponents of Christian just war theory! I'm going back to uni soon and got majorly distracted with some other projects so I don't think I'll be coming back to this fic, I just thought I'd quickly post up the rest of what I had (fully) written haha T_T


End file.
